Referral traffic is one of the top acquisition sources for many online businesses. Therefore, many teams are eager to not only track the overall performance of this channel but also to understand its sources and, more importantly, the exact page referrer (full referral path).

Universal Analytics’s referral report allowed us to see the referral sources and full-page URLs from which the specific traffic was sent. Google Analytics 4 doesn’t have this in-built report yet. 

However, there is a workaround solution this article will present below to find the page referrer in GA4.

What is Page Referrer in GA4?

Page Referrer is the complete referral URL presenting the page from which the traffic was sent to your website. 

For instance, if the traffic was initially sent to you from Google Search, you will see “www.google.com,” but if it was sent from another 3rd party website, you will see the exact page path where your website is mentioned.

Full Referral URL allows businesses to monitor which websites help you acquire more traffic and which referral pages work better. 

For instance, some referral websites can have multiple links to your website among their website pages, and some pages can work better than others in terms of metrics (leads, signups, trials, orders, purchases). 

You can monitor which referral pages perform better and negotiate with the partner to pay for those that send high-quality traffic. As a result, you have high-quality traffic and a lower budget spent. 

As mentioned below, Google Analytics 4 doesn’t have the in-built report to monitor it, but let’s explore how to create such a report step by step using GA4 Explorations.

How to find Page Referrer (Full Referral URL) in Google Analytics 4?

According to my other article about differences between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, one of the core differences is the privacy aspect in GA4. GA4 is built to meet global privacy policy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA. 

As a result, Google changed the available information in Google products about Referral traffic, and the referral path is no longer available in Google Analytics 4.

However, there is still a possibility to find this full referral path in GA4 using “session_start” event.

Please follow these steps to create a report to find Page Referrer in GA4:

Once you do that, you will see the report as the one presented above. 

If you want to add more metrics, such as conversions, purchases, and revenue. You can add them, too. 

Other ways to find the exact Referral Path

Sometimes, we need other ways to find the full referral path, in this cases, we rely on others tools: some of them are free while others require to have a paid subscription. Let’s look at them briefly.

Firstly, you can use Google Search to find the exact Referral Path(es). 

To retrieve this information from Google Search, you should search in Google using this pattern “keyword site:domain name”. You can see the example below, where I searched for any mentions of “nomos” websit on ”geopoliticsandempire” website. 

Although this approach can illuminate where your website was mentioned, it can’t tell you how much traffic and conversions the specific referral path generated if there are multiple mentions on the same domain. 

Secondly, you can use external paid resources to find the referral path. A few to mention are Semrush and Ahref. The tools used for SEO and can allow you to track every backlink (referral page URLs). 

Thirdly, when you know that some referral traffic comes from the specific referral, and this referral has a few pages where your brand was mentioned. I recommend you talk to this referral and ask to add UTM parameters. UTM parameters will help you to track every page separately in Google Analytics 4, and you will get transparent analytics with all core metrics. 

Wrapping Up

To summarize, because of privacy policies, Google Analytics 4 doesn’t show page referrer as a standard report, but you can create a GA4 Exploration report with a “session_start” event to track the complete referral path in GA4. Besides that, there are also a few other ways to find the exact referral path mentioned above. 

However, the best way to monitor any acquisition source is to set up UTM parameters that allow you to properly track all traffic and enjoy seeing the complete view in GA4.